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Month: March 2019

The Brexit chaos at Westminster is shared by people in my life. This week I even had a conversation about Brexit at the supermarket checkout. In normal times politics does not get discussed in this situations. the pace of some very confusing politics is causing a wider confusion.

Brexit has been an interesting subject for me. As for once I am not in either groups at the ends of the spectrum (the Union Jack waving Brexiteers and the EU flag waving Remainers). I’ve fallen into the remain camp as perhaps I don’t really like sitting in the middle. Britain has been regarded as a tolerant nation but seems to be becoming less so. This division is quite worrying. Such a division is where a community focuses on where they are different rather than what they have in common.

I’ve written before about how if the Brexit referendum had been ‘Should the UK have a looser relationship with the EU’ to hold back from a centralising political project and just cooperate as much as possible, I feel there would have been a huge majority for this. I also feel that the people of the UK would agree that our political system is broken and that our economy is weakening, that these two things are linked and that we should do something about resolving these problems.

However this Brexit has instead divided us into Brexiters and Remainers. With all the chaos in Westminster and now we are into a two week extension of the ticking clock of No Deal explulsion from the EU, to me the sensible thing to do is revoke Article 50, drop the weight of concern about the relationships of Europe and instead fix things in Britain. However the Brexiters seem to have an obsessive zeal with leaving the EU at any cost and fixing the mess afterwards in a chaotic political situation. This seems a somewhat unreasonable position, especially as the Brexiters have not spent the last two years building consensus and putting forward a plan of action for a post-Brexit situation.

There was a pro-Brexit march in London today. Watching these things I just see a tide of angry white grey haired men.

I have talked about outsiders, or minority groups and privilege on these pages. If one thing defines this group of people, the Brexiters is that they do not consider themselves outsiders, they consider themselves the majority. On paper, from opinion polls and so on, it is clear that they are a minority, albeit a sizable one. As white men they are privileged and usually get there way, they vote Tory and get Tory governments, they vote for Brexit and Brexit happens. As a group they seem to little realise how much privilege they have and what it is like to be in a minority group. I have never voted Tory, I’ve never voted for anyone who has won an election [well apart from once for a Police commissioner, but no-one else really cared much about that election, and my area has not become a post-apocalyptic crime riddled wasteland since]. My interests are minority interests. but many of the Brexiters don’t perhaps get this because they feel they are in the majority for most things. Whilst everyone else may be making reasonable arguments and trying to find a consensus, they worry that everyone else is trying to stop their Brexit as if they are people who have never had anything their way and this is the one thing they are passionate about. Yet on any other topic this group tend to be dismissive of the ‘one thing’ of other groups, whether that’s LGBT rights, the Welsh language, Vegans and so on.

I just feel hope that understanding will increase and that we can all work together to make our society a better one to live in. to do that we need to listen to every group and genuinely engage and look deeply into grievances rather than casually dismiss them as many of the Brexiters (and indeed Remainers) seem to do. In some ways I feel that Britain needs more chaos just to ram this point across to everyone. Hopefully we have reached peak-chaos and can start re-building our society and our political system.

I’ve really tried not to write about the daily machinations of Brexit, largely because it would merely be venting my spleen on the whole inept mess and that it is pretty much as I feared and predicted almost three years ago.

These are very dark times for democracy. The UK government has spent three years avoiding making a decision and not letting anyone else have an input into the Brexit decision making process, no consensus has been reached and the government still have no plan. It’s kind of worse than that as the UK seems further from consensus on the relationship with the EU than in 2016. All sorts of knee-jerk opinions continue to fly around, the same knee-jerk opinions that were shouted three years ago, nothing has developed or progressed and all the other problems the UK has have been sidelined.

Really the sensible option at this point is to just forget about the whole thing. National unity is more important than endless division, get back to the day job and then start to have a proper discussion about the UK’s relationship with the EU. A betrayal of the Brexit vote would be ignoring the causes of Brexit and not looking for solutions to them.

The same three options that have been on the table since November last year are still on the table, a week before something has to happen because of Article 50 was invoked by Theresa May. The difficulty is that none of the options end Brexit, they are the end of the beginning and the UK continues this endless discussion of what Brexit is.

It’s probably worth stating what the three options are:

1/ “No deal Brexit” – The UK leaves the EU on the 29th of March or perhaps now the 12th of April. Expect chaos.

2/ “Theresa May’s Deal” The UK enters the transition period on the 20th of April and negotiations start for the future relationship with the EU. Not so much happens but politically this gets even more divisive. Noting that this deal does three things, Sets up the rules for EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU (those that haven’t been able to dual citizenship into their host countries anyway), Settles how much the UK pays the EU for outstanding commitments and the whole transition process rules (maintaining the UK border in Ireland and current rules for now)

3/ Revoke Article 50 and stay in the EU until the UK works out whatever it is it wants. Cue the Eurosceptics continuing to moan, but a lot louder than they did before.

It’s an utter mess, I expected it to be this mess, which was why I voted remain in the first place. Remember my warning about ‘Don’t trust those who claim they knew what Brexit was?’ there seem to be a whole lot more of them now. Option 3 just seems the most sensible choice, given the utter failure of the political class to do anything for three years and the Brexit advocates never putting forward any plan at all. Whether you supported Brexit, remain or are somewhere in-between this is just crazy. An analogy, the kitchen needs cleaning, so you decide to clean the kitchen, but you have no plan, instead you just grab a bottle of liquid detergent wildly spray it around the kitchen and then declare that the kitchen has been cleaned, it hasn’t it’s just a mess, that’s basically the state of Brexit and the UK at the moment.

It could have been so much easier, with the UK leaving the EU, but remaining in and establishing a single market tier with a separate parliament to agree single market rules (EU and EEA countries) and none of this Article 50 nonsense.

I can’t predict what will happen in the next weeks, but it will be bad.